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Monday, November 28, 2016

Capitalism's Savage Legacy

We can't have guns and butter.

By Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired

As we head in to Christmas and as we are inundated by more ads on TV
that we should love our neighbors and go buy them something, we should not
remain oblivious to the fact that the US capitalist class is leading the race
toward nuclear annihilation.

There is no doubt that US capitalism is losing its global
influence and is facing increasing competition for that influence from China in
particular and from India and Russia to a lesser extent.

The good news for Russian capitalism is that wages have sunk
so low that manufacturers are salivating at the thought of having production
facilities so close to Western Europe.The average Russian salary fell to $558 in 2015 according to Bloomberg
BusinessWeek,a 30% decline from 2015.

Russian wages levels are now “broadly competitive with China’s for the first time since the Czarist
era ended a century ago…” BW adds.Samsung, Ikea and other manufacturers are already increasing investment
there.

One lesson for us here in the US is that Trump’s claim to
bring back Rust Belt jobs was nothing but an electoral ploy, like most of this
degenerate narcissist’s claims. Even if US workers wages were competitive with
Russia and China’s, new technology and automation is reducing the need for
workers both here and in China as Mick Brooks pointed out on this blog last week. But
capital will always flow to the cheaper labor as long as shipping and other costs don’t
negate it. The Chinese are too expensive now and production has been moving to
Cambodia, Bangladesh and Vietnam.

Meanwhile, US capitalism’s provocative foreign policy is
increasing tensions in Eastern Europe as the US has troops near the Russian
border, is supporting the fascists in Ukraine (and in the White House or Trump Tower?) and installing missile defense
systems in Poland, supposedly as a defense against an invasion from Iran. No
one in the world believes this of course but that doesn’t really matter as it’s
only important that Americans do or that we are at the very least too occupied
with Black Friday and the Superbowl to be aware of it.

At the other end of the world the US is stoking
the flames of discontent in South East Asia.It has been pushing the Australians to be more aggressive with regards
to China as US capitalism needs to slow down China’s industrial development.
Progress is good as long as the guy at the top has all the guns and all the
money.

When I was in Northern Queensland I talked with a number of
Australians who were opposed to the US building more military facilities in the
Townsville area. It was not because they disliked Americans. But they saw it as
a move that would likely drag Australia in to US capitalism’s disastrous War on
Terror.

The US has been increasing tensions with China in the same
way it has with Russia by surrounding the country with military installations
and by increasing its presence in waters China considers its territory.

Chinese analysts are concerned about what they refer to as an,
unprecedented military build up in
the Asia Pacific region, and are concerned that Obama’s escalation and build up
of a US presence in the South China Sea area since 2009 is “dangerously escalatory.”

According to the National Institute for South China Sea
Studies, the US “targeted China with 1200
close reconnaissance missions by ships, and aircraft in 2014 up from 200 in
2009”.

The report added that, “American
military vessels and aircraft carried out more than 700 patrols in the South
China Sea region during 2015, making China the country’s number one
surveillance target.” (Financial Times, 11-26-16)

Can the reader imagine the nationalist furor and fear that would be whipped up by the corporate controlled media if the Russians or Chinese had troops on the Candian or Mexican border? All capitalist states want a military. The US supplies most
of the smaller capitalist states with their weapons of mass destruction as the
world’s dominant supplier of such weapons.

The goal is for US capitalism to retain its number one slot. With
competing world powers or states that have the potential to compete with the US
like China, all the talk of reform, meaning a shift toward a more market
oriented economy and political system, is limited in that a country that heads
in that direction like China, must not be allowed to threaten US capitalism’s
dominant world rule.But it is
inevitable that China will build its military as its economic influence grows,
the same with Russia.

So it’s not that the US capitalist class is any worse
necessarily, they are simply the guys with the big stick.What drives their violence and brutality is
not so much individual qualities or some sort of genetic tendency to violence,
it is the laws of the system that drives them closer to the precipice of
nuclear war.

This doesn’t mean there aren’t cultural traits. Engels attributed
the crude and violent nature of the US bourgeois to their history. The British
bourgeois for example fought a centuries old ideological war against the feudal
aristocracy and its theoreticians in the Catholic Church.They had to defend their ideas and the
righteousness of their economic system. The US bourgeois on the other hand did
not have a ruling class that they had to dislodge. Putting it crudely, their
rise to power was based on sheer physical violence, they had to build some
infrastructure and wipe out a few million of the Native population with their
technologically superior weaponry.

We have discussed this issue of eventual nuclear war in the
phone conferences some of us around this blog have once a week.There are currently over 16,000 nuclear
warheads possessed by nine countries. We have to exclude Israel as they do not
comment on their stockpile and are supported in this by the US., but the average
guess is it is in the hundreds.One
might consider why the Iranians are a little leery and object to the fact they
have to allow inspections and the Zionist regime or the US doesn’t.

They never built nuclear weapons with the intention of never
using them. And admittedly, they have acted as a deterrent to a degree. But
there is no way that at some point these are not going to be used. Capitalism
is not a friendly humane system of social organization. It is brutal, violent,
genocidal. Each nation state for fear of extinction must seek markets, must
possess raw materials, must outdo its rivals in this struggle or die. Smaller
states must align themselves to their larger neighbors, join the few competing
trading blocs under the domination of a superpower, Germany, China, the US or
Russia etc. Meanwhile the workers, peasants and dispossessed of these states
fight back in any way possible. The suicide bomber is not a person that thinks
there is much of a future but a person whose culture, life, existence on this
earth is unbearable.

States crumble, become failed states and millions end up as economic or war
refugees fleeing to safety, Central Americans in the former case, Syrians, Iraqis. Afghanis or Somalis in the latter.

Two World wars have been fought over markets. We see it,
hear the cause of it every day, growth, growth, growth.What they’re talking about with growth is the
expansion of the markets and the process of profit taking and capital
accumulation. This is what drives the system and the actions of its major
players.

A well-meaning friend praised me, and folks like me, for my
passion. But it’s not a question of passion. I am firmly convinced that
capitalism will destroy life on this planet if it is not overthrown and
replaced by a democratic socialist global society, a world federation of
socialist states. In this way social wealth which is a collective product can
be allocated collectively based on human needs and not profits. I can see no other way out.

I have grandchildren. I have friends with children. How can
I keep quiet when I do not believe a child of five will reach 60, or even 50? I
believe this firmly. If the reader disagrees with me, then find the objective
evidence that leads you to disagree with me and show it. That god will
intervene or you pray that things will change isn’t enough. If praying worked
there’d be no starving people in this world, if praying gives you the strength
to fight to change the system, that’s a different praying. If you have children it is your obligation to them to think about the world where it is headed and how you can be part of creating a future in which they will be safe and can reach their potential as free human beings.

The working class will struggle to change things but without
a theoretical grounding and a leadership that has learned the lessons of
history there will be much unnecessary suffering as there is now or there will
be failure.

One thing is certain. There are no guarantees in this world
and there is no such place as heaven.